


Both Sides

by the_chaotic_panda



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Bickering, Fluff, M/M, minimal angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 16:06:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19771705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_chaotic_panda/pseuds/the_chaotic_panda
Summary: In which the truest things are said with someone else's lips, and Aziraphale resents his new knickers.





	Both Sides

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends, enemies and strangers - I present to you a Thing, fresh from the bowels of brainery. I emerged several weeks ago from the Good Omens womb and these are my first tentative steps, so do be gentle with me and please let me know if I've successfully walked or if I've in fact plummeted headfirst towards the floor and smacked my head on a filing cabinet. Either way, it'll be useful. Voila!

If Aziraphale had thought he’d be switching bodies with a sauntering sycophant of the occult, he’d have worn nicer underwear. Alas, the forces of foresight seem to avoid said sycophant like hipsters avoid dairy and goodness, the smell of sour milk is ripe on his collar. 

“Crowley, dear, have you never heard of a dry cleaner? Or – or a washing machine?” Aziraphale asks, picking at a crust of – of  _ something  _ on his rotting lapel. “Although I really would recommend a dry cleaner. There’s a lovely little place on New Cavendish Street, you should –“ 

Crowley is frowning at him. Except, he’s not Crowley, he’s – well, he’s Aziraphale. It’s unsettling, to say the least. Is his waistcoat really that unflattering? When Crowley speaks, it’s with a prim, fluttering voice that simply  _ can’t  _ be his own. 

“You’re a demon, now. Do you really want the undoing of this entire plan to be a whiff of fabric softener?” 

“I hardly think they’ll –“  _ goodness,  _ he sounds so  _ common  _ “ – notice a lack of fungus,” he finishes, pulling at the so-called tie around his neck. It would be better suited to wrangling wild dogs. In fact, he’s sure he spots a tooth mark. 

“Oh, they will,” Crowley drawls, slinging a freshly – miraculously – ironed corduroy leg over the arm of his obnoxious throne. If he damages them, holy water will be the least of his demonic worries. “They’re  _ made  _ of fungus. They  _ ooze  _ fungus. Welcome to spore central, angel.”

Aziraphale looks down at himself, his new face crumpling. Of  _ course  _ his belt is a snake. Of  _ course  _ his boots are more concerned with outward style than inner arch support. His legs are too long, his fingernails are an epidemic waiting to happen, and the amount of chest hair he’s displaying is frankly whoreish. He feels like a gentleman stuffed into the body of a spider. A particularly  _ smelly  _ spider. 

“If it’s too much for you, we can always call it off. You’ll be burned to a crisp, of course, and I’ll make a fine gravy, but at least we’ll be wearing the right pants.” Crowley has a smile on his face that he exclusively pairs with mockery, usually at Aziraphale’s expense. “Yours are lovely, by the way. Lenor lavender, right?” He wafts dramatically. Aziraphale resents watching his own hands taunt him. 

“You’ll have to drop the attitude if you’re going to – to plagiarise me,” Aziraphale sniffs. “I don’t say  _ pants. _ ” 

“Knickers, then. Sundries. Breeches, undergarments, unmentionables. Am I getting warm?” 

He’ll be getting much more than warm in a few hours – but this hardly bears thinking about. Underwear aside, Aziraphale is beginning to wonder if this fantastical plan doesn’t have several damning flaws. “But what happens if they  _ know,  _ Crowley,” he worries, “angels and demons are so vastly different, what if there’s a – a  _ sign, _ or a feeling, or –“ 

“They won’t need a feeling if you keep talking like an aristocrat,” Crowley snorts, and with considerable effort due to the sheer weight of rings, bracelets and the blood of innocents, Aziraphale crosses his arms. 

“You’re not taking this very seriously,” he sulks, “this is life and death – vitality or – or evisceration!”

“I  _ am  _ serious. If you don’t loosen those wonderfully sharp shoulder blades of yours – of  _ mine  _ – they’ll smell a rat. And it won’t be the one living in Hastur’s jockstrap.” 

Aziraphale winces, thinks about pursing his lips, wringing his hands – and then abruptly stops. He rehearsed with the leading players of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He can act a demon to prevent his own liquidation. 

By increments, he relaxes his new body, settling his eyebrows from their usual heightened panic to what he hopes is an expression of nonchalance. He kicks one spindly leg over the other, slouching his poor spine and letting his jaw slacken. “Have I achieved the desired level of impropriety?” 

“ _ Desired level of impropriety,”  _ Crowley repeats, high and mocking. Then he coughs, straightens himself out, laces his fingers together in a way that Aziraphale is desperate to replicate and raises impeccably, painfully plucked eyebrows. “Books. Sushi. Oh, woe is me, I’ve let my cocoa go cold again!” 

Aziraphale scowls. “I’m Crowley and I think I’m  _ so hip  _ in my jacket and my boots but really I have no sense of personal hygiene and I think it’s funny to hand my friend over to a gang of freaks with insects welded to their heads!” 

“ _ That’s  _ more like it,” Crowley smirks, waving a chubby finger, “although, never say _ hip  _ again. Ever.”

“Fine,” Aziraphale concedes, throwing his hands out and sighing with as much attitude as he can muster eight hours after the world should have ended. He could do with a nice book – something light, with the ability to block out body-stealing demons and their ineffable musings – and maybe a scone. 

Crowley, on the other hand, could do with several more reasons not to walk up to his ornate mirror and kiss his own angelic reflection so hard that when, if, they eventually get their own bodies back, Aziraphale might feel it lingering on his lips. His toes fidget in his twee little shoes, and he glares at them. This body isn’t built for fidgeting. It’s built for sitting quietly and ignoring several thousand years of disastrous, romantic anarchy. 

They haven’t talked about the bus. Aziraphale had taken his hand like it was nothing, another page in his endless library, but Crowley can still feel the warmth centred in his palm like wax that hasn’t quite had the chance to cool. He hopes the flame is still lit, however short-lived. “We’ll have to make a move, soon,” he says. Aziraphale’s voice twists his meaning. 

“I’m not ready,” his own body tells him, shuffling to and fro with the tension Crowley feels in Aziraphale’s bones. “I just need to get into character. Why do you not, after six thousand years on this blessed planet, possess a sofa?” 

“There’s room on this throne for two.” Crowley shifts Aziraphale’s body to one side and gestures to the pathetic few inches of space he’s created. He can feel Aziraphale’s thighs beneath his hands, and quickly curls them to fists – this is not the way he imagined touching them, nor does it feel very mannerly. This body is a rental, and he needs his deposit back.

“What if Hastur makes a reference that I don’t understand?” Aziraphale asks, his yellow eyes wide. Satan, they’re ugly. Crowley has no idea how the angel stands to look at them. 

“No-one understands anything Hastur says,” Crowley drawls, waving a hand, “not even him.” 

“What if one of us makes it and not the other?” 

Ah. Now, this would negate the purpose of the plan. “I don’t know,” he shrugs, thinking of the few drops of holy water left in the flask. It’s a last resort, a plan Z in the event of eternal loneliness. “More room on the park bench, I suppose.” 

If the chair he’s sitting on was suddenly tipped backwards, the feeling would be indistinguishable from that which jolts through him as he watches the pain flash across Aziraphale’s face. “I don’t want to talk to you if you’re going to say things like that,” Aziraphale snaps. Crowley’s own flesh walks away from him. 

“It was a joke,” he protests, jerking from his chair and stumbling on too-short legs. “I’m joking!” 

“Are you?” his own voice asks him. “Are you really? You’ve had a death wish since the eighteenth century, and I was stupid enough to facilitate that, too! I can’t keep watching you throw your life around, it’s not just you that’s getting hurt, Crowley!” 

Beyond the yellow eyes, divinity is splitting apart. Hitting the grounds of Hell left him less tender. The hand he’d like to hold is quickly fastened to his own spindly arm. “I’m sorry,” he says to the self standing before him. For the first time whilst looking at his own reflection, he just about means it. “Seriously, I’m sorry.” 

“Oh, you’re  _ serious.  _ That makes it all better.” 

“I am!” Crowley snaps. It doesn’t have as much bite in the language of the Southern Pansy. “I thought I’d lost you in that fire! Say what you like about death wishes, you’re the only one who’s gone and died!” 

Aziraphale has demonstrated time and time again that knowing when to shut up is not his strongest suit, but just this once – perhaps because he’s inside the body of the very demon who’d like him to button it in the first place – he stays silent. Crowley watches the squirm of his features like caterpillars under a magnifying glass. His previously damned soul hops a little further downwards in its twinge of satisfaction. 

“Anyway,” he counters, smoothing over the ruffles in the air between them, “we’d best be off, soon.” 

His own mouth purses with an attitude only an angel could carry off with such elegance. It occurs to Crowley, as he watches a forked tongue shoot across Aziraphale’s lips, that this body sharing business is far more intimate than either of them dared to imagine. It also occurs to Crowley – later, much later, when the dust has settled and the fog has cleared – that this observation involved a fair amount of staring. In particular, at Aziraphale’s mouth. What happens next is therefore a complete surprise to Crowley. 

The hand on his cheek is nothing, really – perhaps there’s a hair in his face, or a beetle, or maybe he’s burst into angelic tears, who knows what this body can do – and then the hand on his waist, well, that could have any number of purposes, Aziraphale always wants to dance at the worst of times. The tingling sensation over his skin as he feels his own face come back to him is unsettling, granted, but he’s thankful for it in the end, the one-pronged tongue was bloody awful at getting the rice out of his teeth. The kiss, though – that’s the real shocker. 

It’s only a brush of their lips, a sensory hors d’oeuvre, and Crowley has eaten far more fanciful feasts at far better dressed tables, but for a brief moment, time crawls to a stop. The forces of Heaven and Hell could have restarted the apocalypse and Crowley would not have noticed. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale says out of nowhere. Crowley has forgotten there was a question at all, let alone what it was. 

“Ye – what?” he says, wishing he was back in Aziraphale’s body so that wanting to crawl out of his own skin would seem more natural, “Sorry?” 

“We had better be going.” He straightens his bowtie as if he didn’t just give a demon a spiritual meltdown. 

“We – you – but, you – I – “ Speech is suddenly impossible and ridiculous. What could it possibly express that Aziraphale’s lips against his own could not? 

This train of thought – first class, direct, delay-free – is what carries him into Aziraphale’s arms, his hands moulded to the angel’s face and their mouths pressed together like the final pieces in an extensive and infuriating jigsaw puzzle. If it wasn’t for Aziraphale’s hand anchored in his hair, Crowley would have raised his middle finger to gravity and floated upwards until the stars around him matched the ones behind his eyes. 

“Wait – mmh – wait,” Crowley mumbles against the onslaught of lips. Aziraphale pulls back, exhales over Crowley’s face and Crowley struggles to keep hold of whatever he was about to say. It was important, he knows it, he wouldn’t have stopped the best plot twist of his life for anything other than – “I love you.”

The question is unspoken. Whether the answer matters or not is something Crowley’s been toying with for the past few hundred years. Either way, he holds tight to Aziraphale’s lapels and awaits the reply like it’s the word of God – or Satan – or whoever it is he’s loyal to these days. Perhaps Freddie Mercury. 

“About time,” Aziraphale says. Crowley doesn’t get the joke that lights the angel’s eyes – in fact, he rather resents it, but then he’s being kissed again and it’s difficult to focus on any concrete thought. No wonder humans never get anything done. 

“Wait,” Crowley stalls again, “so – so – do you –“ 

“Do I love you?” Aziraphale supplies. He looks unnervingly cocky. “Do I, your best friend of six thousand years, the keeper of your secrets and the enabler of all your little schemes, your damsel in distress and your date to the Ritz, love you? My dear boy, I don’t see how any other conclusion could possibly be drawn. Of  _ course _ I love you.” 

Crowley stands, processes, digests. “Oh,” he says. It’s not quite what he pictured blurting. “Well. That’s good, then.” 

“Rather a shame we waited until we’re about to walk into our respective hells before we –“ 

“Had a bloody good snog?” 

The way Aziraphale laughs makes Crowley wonder how on Earth he managed to resist the angel for so long. Succumbing to temptation is a listed skill on his resume. “Yes. Quite.” 

“Maybe once this is over, we could have a few more?” 

“Maybe,” Aziraphale says, a hellish spark in his heavenly eyes. “Now – I believe I have a costume to return to. If I catch something, you’ll be to blame.” He takes Crowley by the hands and the tingling begins again, Aziraphale’s eyes blazing yellow and his hair bleeding red.

“You’re an angel – the only thing you can catch is feelings,” Crowley grins, and his own smile bounces back to him. The residue of warmth clings to his lips means he forgets to cringe. He always hated his crooked nose, wonky morals, too-big mouth, but he supposes that if an angel – a silly, sweet, fussy angel – likes him ( _ loves  _ him – Crowley tries not to dwell on this fact for the sake of remaining upright), he must not be that bad after all. 

  
  



End file.
